Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight: Poems - Softcover

Di Stefano, Dante

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1944467025 ISBN 13: 9781944467029

Publisher: Brighthorse Books, 2016

Synopsis

Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight is a collection of contemporary poetry by award-winning poet Dante Di Stefano, whose work has appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere.

About this title

About the Author

Dante Di Stefano's poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, The Red Hen Press Poetry Award, Crab Orchard Review's Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea González Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He is a correspondent for The Best American Poetry Blog, a poetry editor for Dialogist, and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia. He earned his PhD in Poetry from Binghamton University and lives in Endwell, New York.

Review

ADVANCE PRAISE for LOVE IS A STONE ENDLESSLY IN FLIGHT
 
Dante Di Stefano's first book is absolute proof that poetry rises from the ruins. He sings of Binghamton, New York, and the hardscrabble streets where he grew up. He sings the praises of dumpster sparrows and anonymous saints most of us never see. He sings of his father, a postal worker for more than thirty years who died of cancer, the intimate objects and aching absences he left behind. Yet, if the poet confronts death bravely--even speaking in the voice of an unrepentant drone pilot--he also embraces life, the miracles of the everyday. There is music everywhere, from Nina Simone to Muddy Waters to Professor Longhair. There is the childhood friend who insisted, convincingly, that the baby Jesus lived in his washing machine. As the title tells us, love motivates the poems of Dante Di Stefano; love drives them to the page in the middle of the night; love will keep you turning the pages. -Martín Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Zapata's Disciple
 
In his auspicious debut, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, Dante Di Stefano deftly draws upon the blank verse of Milton's Paradise Lost to create his own attempt to understand the strange ways of God in our troubled and lovely world.Where everything seems bent on disappearing--dreamer-fathers, channeled wounded jazz men, "a mother's pirouetted loops on Hallmark cards," the Triple Cities School of Beauty Culture--all of it, "endlessly in flight," DiStefano sings the lives that "swam the world as sunlight through a school/of fish, glints in an ever shifting veil." -Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera
 
Dante Di Stefano's powerful debut is, in part, an extended elegy for his father--a journey of loss and love, as well as acceptance and gratitude. It also praises the many tutelary figures who have guided his artistic life. (As the poet Lynda Hull once wrote, "Oh the many lives that have fountained through / my own.")Like William Carlos Williams, he knows that respecting nature requires an understanding of decay--spring and all--and that investigating rot may yield more answers than radiant blooms. But most of all, this collection advocates resilience and humility, essential qualities that deserve this passionate celebration. -Sascha Feinstein, author of Misterioso and Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present
 
Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight is a joyride down a stretch of the American Main Street full of mysteries, signs, and potholes. Dante Di Stefano looks for the sacred in all the wrong places, and in so doing finds traces of it everywhere. These poems overflow with life and speak straight from a tremendous heart. -Tom Bouman, author of Dry Bones in the Valley

Edition details

• Publisher: Brighthorse Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1944467025
• ISBN 13: 9781944467029
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 108